Monday, 21 July 2014

Personality and pregnancy

Roger Watson, Editor-in-Chief

There has been considerable interest in the relationship between issues related to childbirth and personality, much of it published in JAN (Brown 2014, Kenney & Bhattacharjee 2000, Wiklund et al. 2009) in recent years. This trend continues and a paper by Harville et al. (2014) titled 'Personality and adolescent pregnancy outcomes' investigates how personality factors measured using the ‘Big Five’ NEO-FFI personality inventory and published in JAN reports the following results (in the authors’ own words):

"Agreeableness and intellect/imagination were associated with a reduced likelihood of becoming pregnant as an adolescent, while neuroticism, conscientiousness and extraversion were all associated with an increased likelihood of becoming pregnant. Higher neuroticism was associated with lower birth weight and gestational age among Black girls, but not non-Black. Conscientiousness was associated with lower gestational age among non-Black girls. No relationships were found with extraversion or agreeableness and birth outcomes. Receiving late or no prenatal care was associated with higher intellect/imagination."